Table of Contents
They say there are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. But I’d already read Tolkien’s masterpiece several times by the time I was 14, and I had (and still have) no interest in Atlas Shrugged.
Instead, at 14 I read Illuminatus! Possibly inappropriate reading for a 14-year-old, but I’d been fascinated ever since it was advertised, bizarrely, in the back of a Star Wars novelisation. Fnord. Then I read it and it blew my mind.
Just as it apparently blew the mind of a Scots lad 10 years my senior: a certain Jimmy Cauty. Cauty was an artistically inclined teenager who, at just 17, painted the poster that long occupied pride of place on my bedroom wall – the Lord of the Rings poster he painted for British publisher Athena. In 1997, Cauty was in the audience for the National Theatre stage production of Illuminatus! A set designer for the show was a certain Bill Drummond, who, as King Boy D, joined Cauty, renamed Rockman Rock, as one half of the JAMs.
You’ve probably never heard of the JAMs, but you’ve almost certainly heard of the Timelords and the KLF. If you haven’t, you’ll at least be able to instantly hum the refrain, “Doctor Whooo-ooo… Doctor Who! Doctor Whooo-ooo… Doctor Who!” We’ll get to how these two Scots anarchists became chart-toppers soon, but before that, they were a bizarre British take on hip-hop, called the JAMs.
The JAMs, or Justified Ancients of Mummu, took their name from the Illuminatus! trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s sprawling 1975 mind-bender. A satirical romp through conspiracies, the books pit the Illuminati, structure-obsessed order freaks hell-bent on control, against the Justified Ancients of Mummu, Discordian agents of glorious mayhem. Fnord. Discordianism itself is the ultimate piss-take religion, cooked up in the 1960s around the Principia Discordia, a fake ‘sacred text’ cobbled together by a group of college hippies armed with photocopiers and felt-tips.
Illuminatus! is certainly heavy stuff. It veers from detective thriller to Lovecraftian cosmic horror and New Wave science fiction, all liberally soaked in drugs, rock’n’roll and free sex. Everything a teenage boy could ever want. But, like Lao Tse reincarnated as Timothy Leary, there’s a deep vein of libertarian philosophy behind the epic piss-taking. Worship Eris, Greek goddess of discord and strife. Embrace absurdity. Reject dogma. The sacred practice? Operation Mindfuck: flood the zone with nonsense, fake conspiracies and surreal stunts, until the straights crack and question everything.
Cauty and Drummond absorbed it all like sponges and turned it into pop superstardom – and then blew it all up, burning a million quid while they were at it.
After dabbling with various musical projects, including Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, Cauty teamed up with Drummond for a new venture, to explore his fascination with the newest thing from America, hip-hop. Naturally, they named themselves for the Justified Ancients of Mummu, shortened to the JAMs (in typically Discordian fashion, Wilson and Shea claimed that the MC5’s classic, “Kick Out the Jams” was a coded Illuminati instruction to reject free-thinking).
The ‘Discordian’ philosophy of Illuminatus! became the JAMs’ aesthetic north star. The JAMs weren’t a band: they were a conspiracy. Mummu, the lost continent of esoteric bollocks, became their mythical homeland. Every press release, every cryptic NME ad, every billboard defacement was pure Operation Mindfuck. They weren’t chasing hits: they were waging guerrilla war on the culture industry. Fnord. As soon as I heard it, I recognised the references and got the joke.
The JAMs were shameless magpies of the first wave of hip-hop. Public Enemy, early Beastie Boys, that raw 1980s Bronx energy of looping breaks and lifting anything that wasn’t nailed down. Drummond and Cauty bought a sampler and went full pirate. Their 1987 debut as the JAMs, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), was a glorious mess of uncleared samples, raps about Thatcher’s Britain in classic Scots dialect (“I knocked at the door but they didnae let me in”) and zero fucks given. They sampled entire choruses from the Monkees, nearly three minutes of Top of the Pops, distorted choruses from Fiddler on the Roof and snatches of Samantha Fox.
Most notoriously, “The Queen and I” sampled the first 45 seconds of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” set to a breakbeat backdrop, looping the ’70s kitsch into a sneering political rant, set against a keyboard melody that sounds like a Donald Duck strangling a screaming baby. It was punk as sampling should be: crude, funny and deliberately offensive to the old guard.
But it was almost all killed in the womb. The music industry, for all its counter-culture pretensions, is just another branch of the Illuminati: authoritarian and greedy control freaks. Even Woodstock began life with an ad in the Wall Street Journal. So ABBA, naturally, went full corporate. Drummond and Cauty tried in vain to meet the Swedes to plead their case: they weren’t stealing art; they were liberating it from the lawyers.
The industry, of course, saw only lost royalties. So, in a devastating legal action, the JAMs were quite literally kicked out. The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society ordered the masters and all copies destroyed. Fnord. Unsold stock was recalled and, legend has it, dumped in the North Sea. The album vanished faster than a socialist’s principles in government. Perhaps appropriately, today it’s only available in pirated editions (mine is from a digitisation actually ripped from Cauty’s personal copy of the album: how’s that for provenance?)
History not being without a sense of irony, though, Cauty and Drummond made their fortunes from their next venture by re-imagining and smashing together two of the best-known tunes in modern British culture. According to legend, the duo were attempting to make a rocked-up version of the Doctor Who theme. The more they amped up the bass and drums, though, the more they realised that they essentially re-creating the Glitter Band’s classic “Rock and Roll”. Throwing the Sweet’s “Blockbuster” and Dalek sounds into the mash-up, they simply replaced the “rock and roll” refrain with “Doctor Who-ooo!”, and suddenly had a number one hit on their hands.
The pair wrote up their experience as a semi-piss-taking ‘instruction manual’, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), a step-by-step guide to achieving a No. 1 single with no money or musical skills. Just like that, Mummu had his revenge. The establishment thought they’d tamed the beasts. Instead, they’d just handed them the keys to the asylum. What the music biz thought they’d tamed as a novelty cash-cow turned into a rampaging bull in the establishment’s china shop.
Rebranded as the KLF, the Kopyright Liberation Front, the JAMs’ snuffed-out star went supernova. Cauty and Drummond dropped stadium house bangers like “3 a.m. Eternal” and “Justified & Ancient” (featuring Tammy Wynette, naturally). They sold millions, pioneered ambient house with Chill Out, and staged multimedia spectacles dripping with sheep, ice-cream vans and machine guns. They were mainstream and underground at once: the ultimate outsider infiltration.
Then, in true Discordian style, they blew it all up in a dorje-like lightning bolt of creative destruction. Invited to perform at the 1992 BRIT Awards, they were slated to perform a straightforward rendition of “3 a.m. Eternal”. Instead they recruited grindcore monsters Extreme Noise Terror as their backing band, blasted a massive “Fuck you” at the assembled suits, and finished with a cigar-chomping Drummond firing a hail of blank machine-gun fire.
As they walked off stage, a voice announced “The KLF have left the building,” and they meant it. They disbanded the KLF and deleted their entire back-catalogue from sale.
Hail Eris.
In 1994, as the K Foundation, they burned a million pounds in a boathouse on the Isle of Jura. Filmed it, of course. The art world clutched its pearls and the music biz seethed. Drummond and Cauty had taken the money, the fame and the infrastructure – and torched the lot as a statement. No comeback tours, no greatest-hits cash-ins, no legacy-branding. Just pure, liberating negation. Fnord. Critics called it nihilism. Bullshit. It was the ultimate rejection of the golden calf. In a world where every rapper brags about the bag and every ‘activist’ artist cashes corporate cheques, Drummond and Cauty proved you could seize the machine, ride it to the top and then detonate it.
Their influence lingers precisely because they were never ‘of’ the industry. They showed that sampling could be art, not theft; that charts could be hacked; that stardom was a joke you could quit mid-punchline. In an age of streaming serfs and algorithm overlords, the JAMs/Timelords/KLF remain a reminder that the real outlaws don’t beg for permission. They burn the contract.
Today’s music industry is more Illuminati than ever: algorithms dictating taste, labels owning your soul and streaming pennies while execs fly private. The self-righteous preach ‘authenticity’ while enforcing the most rigid orthodoxy since the Inquisition. We could use a dose of KLF-style Mindfuck. Not to burn cash for its own sake, but to remind ourselves that the emperors have no clothes, the charts are rigged and the only sane response to a control-obsessed culture is a healthy blast of discord.
The KLF didn’t just make records. They reminded us that creativity thrives in the cracks and sometimes the best move is to light the fuse and walk away laughing.
All hail Discordia.
